Quotes from Annie Lowrey

The United States needs a much more progressive tax-and-transfer infrastructure, given how dramatically inequality has increased. But not every single policy needs to be ideally progressive to achieve that goal.

Income is now more concentrated in the hands of the rich. Those well-off households tend to save and invest higher proportions of their earnings than middle-class or low-income families do.

Economic anxiety might not have won Donald Trump the White House, but much of his strongest support came from more sclerotic rural and industrial areas.

Black women are three times as likely to die giving birth or shortly after birth as white women. Black women in the United States die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.

Deficits are anathema to most Republicans. And Democrats widely believe that government spending should fall as the economy recovers.

Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids.

Cell-based meat, or 'clean' meat - real meat produced in labs - has not become a commercial product yet. But analysts expect it to hit the shelves in 2021 or soon thereafter, and start-ups in this space, such as Memphis Meats, have raised tens of millions of dollars.

The United States is an outlier in the size and scope of its loan infrastructure; in many peer countries, higher education is seen as a public good and a college degree is low-cost or free.

Where Democrats have a real toehold to criticize Republicans is that families still feel very financially fragile. About 2 in 5 adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency.

Wolves are afraid of humans, whereas dogs are not. Wolves hunt game, whereas dogs scavenge human leftovers or eat what their human companions put out for dinner. Wolves are not great at following human commands, whereas dogs are brilliant at it.

Domestic dogs thrive in the backyard and at the foot of the bed. Wolves thrive on the hunt in the country's wildlands.

Wolves want to be wolves. Servals want to be servals. Bears want to be bears. And it is impossible to be a wolf or a serval or a bear when living in a cage.

Americans are no less susceptible to disease, joblessness, and family changes than their peers in rich nations, but they are made more fragile by these crises. The country has a thinner safety net, fewer public goods, and less social insurance than other countries.

Both the federal government and the states should go ahead and soak the rich to reduce inequality and raise money for health care, child care, infrastructure investment, education, decarbonization, and a thousand other priorities.

Urbanization, falling poverty rates, and growing global trade have changed the diets and expanded the waistlines of the world's poor, with processed food and sweetened drinks becoming household staples.

Even very low-income communities are seeing rising rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease as a result. But many countries lack the tax revenue and medical infrastructure to treat such conditions, leading to a burgeoning global-health crisis.

Immigrant families pay taxes. They work. They start businesses. They spend money in their communities. They join native-born families in being economically productive, both paying money to the government and receiving benefits from the government.

The workforce is getting Uberized. The gig economy is taking over the world. Independent-contractor jobs are the new normal.

Taxes do have a clear record of curbing the consumption of, and thus the public-health impact of, tobacco and alcohol.

Police forces across America need root-to-stem changes - to their internal cultures, training and hiring practices, insurance, and governing regulations.

The world needs to slash emissions by tens of billions of tons annually, which categorically requires government investment and government regulations.

Moderately priced homes might draw working families in a metro area. And having rising incomes at the top might price lower-income families out.

The Trump administration, to its credit, has initiatives on housing. It has initiatives on child care. It does not have true initiatives in terms of making health care more affordable and covering the remaining millions of Americans who do not have insurance coverage.

Plastic straws might be everything terrible about American consumerism, individually wrapped. But paper straws put the lie to the belief that we can consume our way out of the problems created by consumerism.